Epistolary literature | Episode 54

Why do we write letters? How do they differ from email and other forms of communication across space?

What do we lose if we stop the ability to send letters by post?

How much of the letters you write are fictions, fact? Contain some kind of truth?

Photo by Bundo Kim on Unsplash

Today’s podcast is part of a series on the conceptual topic of letter writing. You can also listen to the podcast via Apple or Spotify or in the Substack app. A full AI-generated transcript can be accessed on the desktop version.

For the next seven weeks, I’ll bring you texts related to this topic. This series is an experiment for a new podcast season that I recorded to sync up with the holiday letter season and the epistolary form of my latest novel. Stay tuned for more fiction, word sketches, and cultural essays in 2025.

I’d love to hear what you think in the comments. Feel free to ask questions or share text ideas, even your own writing. Thank you!

“A thousand Christmas trees!—at what apiece?”

He felt some need of softening that to me:
“A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars.”

Then I was certain I had never meant
To let him have them. Never show surprise!
But thirty dollars seemed so small beside
The extent of pasture I should strip, three cents
(For that was all they figured out apiece),
Three cents so small beside the dollar friends
I should be writing to within the hour
Would pay in cities for good trees like those,
Regular vestry-trees whole Sunday Schools
Could hang enough on to pick off enough.
A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!
Worth three cents more to give away than sell,
As may be shown by a simple calculation.
Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter.
I can’t help wishing I could send you one,
In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.

-Robert Frost: “Christmas Trees”

Keywords:

• Epistolary

• Christmas cards

• Robert Frost

• Eco-criticism

• Second person

• Art of letter writing

• Preview of texts

Texts:

• https://www.etymonline.com/word/epistolary

  1650s, from French épistolaire, from Late Latin epistolarius "of or belonging to letters," from Latin epistola "a letter, a message" (see epistle). In Middle English as a noun (early 15c.), "book containing epistles read in the Mass," from Medieval Latin epistolarium.

• Christmas letter Hawthorne to his publisher

• Dartmouth has many Christmas letters given and received by Robert Frost

• “Christmas Trees” by Robert Frost

• Auster - 2nd person

• Pebbling

• Art of letter writing

• American Philosophical Society on Letter Writing

• Denver Art Museum: The Art of Letter Writing